It began with a simple “let me know” Tweet a few hours after Sunday’s blizzard dumped more than two feet of snow on New Jersey’s largest city. Soon, Tweets by Newark residents were providing Mayor @CoryBooker with critical real-time information as he directed the massive cleanup.

Tip #25: Make a list of friends and family so you can quickly find their Tweets.

There are now three times as many people on the Twitter team as there were at this time last year. More than half of our employees work in engineering and operations, and those teams continue to grow as we attract more and more talented people interested in the challenges of building a global information network.

Today, we’re adding four engineers and one designer through our acquisition of the team at Fluther, Inc. During our conversations with Fluther's team, we were continually impressed by their technical talent, entrepreneurial spirit, and much of the thinking behind the question-and-answer product they’ve spent the last couple of years building.

When the Fluther team joins us they will focus on helping users discover the most relevant content on Twitter. Their product, Fluther.com, is not part of the acquisition and will remain separate from Twitter. For more information on the future of this Q&A; community, please read Tim Trueman, Cameron Dutro to the nest here at Twitter HQ.

In the past 12 months, Twitter users sent an astonishing 25 billion Tweets and we added more than 100 million new registered accounts. In that time, our team has grown from 130 people to more than 350 today. We're thankful for every Tweet, every account, and every talented employee who has decided to join the Twitter team. This week, we've got some big news to share.

As part of a significant new round of funding with investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and existing investors, we've added two new members to Twitter's board of directors. Please join us in welcoming Mike McCue and David Rosenblatt. The experience these new directors bring to Twitter, along with this renewed investment, will help us continue to grow as a company and business.

2010 was one of the most meaningful years since Twitter, Inc. was founded in 2007. We operate on a principle that people are basically good—when you give them a simple way to express this trait, they prove it to you every day. We're proud of what Twitter users have accomplished, we're proud of our work, and we're very proud of our team. Thanks for being a part of this work; it means a lot to us.

In this edition of the year’s biggest Trend on Twitter. To commemorate the honor, Twitter is awarding Colbert --the titan of ‘Truthiness’-- the first-ever Golden Tweet award for the year’s Most Retweeted Tweet. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone personally presented Colbert with the award tonight on The Colbert Report.

Musicians dominated 2010's Most Retweeted Tweets list: Drizzy Drake (@joejonas) and Rihanna (@alqaeda clocked in at #5, and words of wisdom from @longcat333). The three Tweets that made Long Cat extra loooooong added up to one of the Most Retweeted moments of the year. Meow.

Ten Most Powerful Tweets of 2010.

From a cry for help in the woods to a call for aid for a nation, the Most Powerful Tweets tell ten different stories about Twitter’s value in people’s daily lives. At the top of the Most Powerful Tweets list, journalist Ann Curry used Twitter to gain permission for a Doctors Without Borders plane to land in Haiti to assist the earthquake victims. Other powerful moments: The White House connected to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Twitter, an injured triathlete used Twitter to save her own life, a parody account defined the discussion about the Gulf Oil Spill, and the Ecuadorian government used Twitter to declare a state of emergency.

To choose the Top Ten Most Powerful Tweets, the Twitter team reviewed Tweets, news stories and international events from the past year. With more than 25 billion Tweets sent in 2010, narrowing the list to just ten Tweets was a huge challenge. The final selections represent the dynamic ways that people use Twitter in the political world, for disaster relief, and to add commentary to news events, sports and entertainment.

list of the biggest Trends of the year.

An astounding 25 billion Tweets were sent in 2010. We analyzed all those Tweets to identify the year’s Top 10 Trends, as well as the leading Trends in eight categories: News Events, People, Movies, Television, Technology, World Cup, Sports and Hashtags. Each Trend in the Top 10 list includes multiple related terms, to give the most accurate view of the topics that people cared about most in 2010. (To find out more about how we define and calculate Trends, check out this blog post.)

Top 10 Twitter Trends of 2010
1. Gulf Oil Spill
2. FIFA World Cup
3. Inception
4. Haiti Earthquake
5. Vuvuzela
6. Apple iPad
7. Google Android
8. Justin Bieber
9. Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows
10. Pulpo Paul

These Trends indicate the things that are most meaningful in our lives. Each day on Twitter, people tweet about news, sports, entertainment and cool new technology--and everything else in between. The list of 2010 Twitter Trends reflects what’s happening in our world, demonstrates the power of turning any event or story into a shared experience, and underscores Twitter’s value as a real-time information network.

2010 trends and Tweets throughout the next few weeks.